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Search for “corporate intelligence” or “corporate espionage” on
the Internet and you will be amazed to find how many firms there are
in the business, staffed with people with backgrounds in law enforcement,
intelligence services, investigative journalism or the legal
profession, and providing services to Fortune 500 and other large clients. Sysco
Technology has been witness to a whole host of incidents involving
personal surveillance, tracking by satellite, video and still photography, and
other clandestine tactics. |
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Monitoring Internet activities The Carnivore or any other “packet sniffer” system can be installed at Internet service providers
and capture "packets" of Internet traffic as they travel to and from a targeted computer. It intercepts and
records all e-mail messages, lists all web servers accessed, and tracks everyone who
goes to a specific webpage or FTP file. Sysco
Technology, whose regular browsing habits were known in this way, was
tricked into visiting altered, bogus websites pretending to be the
real thing. The perpetrators, exploiting an
unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer, were also able to
perform attacks.
Impersonations over the phone People posing as
legitimate representatives of banks, retailers, and credit card
companies, in a variety of well-disguised formats, call to ask for
information that together served as intelligence or that might betrayed confidential client details. These calls also generated
confusion and wasted a great deal of time. Some of the named
companies, in these fraudulent calls, were companies Sysco Technology
actually did business with.
Computer hacking Viruses, spam, phishing, and other
hacker attacks have been targeting Sysco Technology in ever more
innovative ways. Keeping such attacks at bay became a
major, time-consuming job. These attacks use ‘spoofed’ emails
and fraudulent websites designed to fool Sysco Technology into
divulging information such as usernames and passwords. They
include attemp to hijack some of
Sysco Technology's domain names.
Mail interception Not even Sysco Technology's
locked mailbox is impregnable, mail having disappeared by means
suspected but not provable.
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